2023: Series A 44 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-unveils-the-worlds-first-c...
2025: Series B 100 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-100m-series-b
2026: Series C 200 Million https://oxide.computer/blog/our-200m-series-c
2026: Series D 445 Million https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1795071/000179507126...
Man, they are just sucking up capital. If somebody like Antropic has made them the primary 'CPU' rack, then that's they kind of cash you need.
I mean, you could probably get multiple GIGAbytes of RAM with 445M.
Intel/Barefoot Tofino 2, VHDL/SystemVerilog, FPGA, QSFP28 (100GbE networking), P4 programming.
Their buyers don’t have customer stories. They don’t sell to SaaS companies.
My understanding is the full rack is about $1.2M and smallest half rack is about $600k and this was before the RAM and other price hikes now.
You are still going to have some residual cloud workloads(so all AWS won’t migrate ) and HA and DR regions etc plus the maintenance and incidentals (power , connectivity ).
I don’t expect anyone less than 5M spends and high base loads is a good fit for their offering.
Also interesting from their Series C press release from earlier this year:
> With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.
They probably will be aquihired by someone like Broadcom.
>I don’t know who needs to hear this
Plenty of people on this forum need to hear it. Because they think otherwise.
>but raising a ton of money is not success.
Yes. It's not even an accurate predictor of future success.
>With this large Series C, we have entirely de-risked capital going forward, which in turn assures our independence.
Independence from whom?
If they mean from everyone, they left out two important categories:
The Series C givers.
The other big C. Customers.
(when older words are good enough, why invent a new word. but I see that as a trend. each new generation wants to distinguish themselves from the past one. So they invent new words as one way of doing that. and some of them get adopted into general circulation or use.)
Unless the two words, fan and fanboy, mean the different things, which i'm not interested in checking out anyway.
right hand: nearly every employee of every org buying these things is sending almost everything to LLMs - or using software ULTIMATELY written by, tested by or whatevered by, these LLMs. LLMs that were created by or distilled from anthropic, openai, or google, who see everything SALIENT about what you do, or what ALL of your customers do, even if they are careful about not looking at the specifics of what you do
I am still a huge fan and supporter of Oxide, and I'm really glad to see them still doing well.
Also forget Dell. Check out DataPacket.com and other metal hosters. You don’t need to physically rack unless you are huge or have special hardware or security needs.
The cloud industry has done an incredible job at a kind of soft pervasive propaganda that running stuff is “hard.”
Edit: my bad, read that as monthly instead of yearly. Still, a yearly spend of millions would still make sense to bring that in-house.
Selfishly of course so I can make sure there are more episodes of Oxide and Friends for years to come. Adam annd Bryan's ability to reference thirty year old simpsons episodes is unmatched.
The interesting part was the software, management interface, Terraform provider and how everything just fit together. Having storage, network and compute all in a single managed rack package brings a lot of value and brings down TCO. Really appreciated the security group like approach to network policies.
Unfortunately I haven't worked with HPE or Dell recently so I'm not sure what they currently offer.
An in-house team is most likely competing with something like Dell or VMware, not really Oxide. A significant part of Oxide’s value proposition is that you’re buying hardware and software purpose built for each other. Unless you’re also going to go so far as to do all of that, which companies like Google do, of course, it’s not really the same thing.
This matters when your various vendors start pointing at each other when something goes wrong. Oxide is truly “one throat to choke” in a way others just aren’t, and stand by that quality.
(Not to mention other various efficiencies, like power, or removing things like the BIOS and BMC junk that’s in basically every other server you buy right now. And the ability to send attenuation from boot up through the host OS. Just tons of things they’re differentiated on that your in house team just isn’t going to do.)
With bills of that magnitude, each time I do a little house cleaning and delete some old data, change storage classes, or discover some unused servers... the savings (that are barely a rounding error on their bill) could pay for a whole year of an engineer or a bunch of servers that could power a good chunk of their production traffic.
I feel like Broadcom with its VMWare acquisition could easily take these guys out if they wanted to (or for that matter, any OEM that has a line of servers + network & storage hardware). They don't, most likely because there isn't actually enough profit to be made there (Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint).
These are business decisions, made in terms of core competencies, capex vs. opex, and the difficulties and cost of building out a reliable, sustainable hosting operation that handles all the compliance and security requirements, and the full range of “ilities” that real businesses have to deal with.
The fact that Bob in IT might be capable of doing some of this on his own doesn’t really enter into the picture. It’s not relevant.
There’s a reason that most companies don’t operate their own electricity generation systems. Much the same is true for computing systems.
The customers will have to deal with it, of course. At least they bought physical systems instead of renting them, so they can use them until they're obsolete.
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Bryan has a good take on the incentive structures holding back commodity hardware vendors: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/O8GSWKpK79s
The capex vs opex theatre is just stupid economics and bad generalization from wall street types.
Almost nothing of it is really real.
And your analogy may impress other glorified salesman, but it doesn't hold water for a second, electricity is fungible, computing is not, electricity is stateless, you computing infrastructure carries your data. Power consumption generally is not a competitive differentiator,computing often is. And of course, the economics IN THE FUCKING REAL WORLD is broken: It is very hard to compete with the prices of the grid, not so in the modern cloud world where hyperscalers captured market enough to feel free to start extracting monopolistic rent from their consumers. And even the premise is uninformed, heavy industry frequently resorts to co-generation, and now, ironically, even data centers projects are exploring it.
That's not a narrow legal perspective, it's one look at a very obvious balance sheet. The same could go for hosting.
It was technically possible with (e.g.) OpenStack for years (decades?) before Oxide ever existing, and yet even with such a solution being around, some folks still went with Oxide. (Or, depending on the scale you want to talk about: Proxmox, XCP-ng.)
Yes, custom hardware is a significant part of Oxide. You have to build your own to do that stuff, and that’s why they did. I alluded to some of the things upthread.
I found out about this round from this thread, just like everybody else, but
> Oxide having to raise money multiple times might be a hint
That’s not the only reason to raise a round, by far, especially when you, you know, are building custom hardware. It isn’t a SaaS business.
EDIT: here’s another commentor with an example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176704
Depends on what you mean by that. Broadcom cremated a lot of VMware's goodwill in the market.
> So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it. And we, in turn, were eager to have them: they were the ones, after all, who joined us in taking a real leap when it felt like there was a lot more risk on the table.
> ...
> Our intent in starting Oxide was not to be an acquisition target but rather build a generational company; this is our life’s work, not a means to an end. With our Series C, customers don’t have to merely take our word for it: we have the capital to assure our survival into the indefinite future.
Maybe you could read that and think its complete bullshit and they're lying their asses off. Considering the people behind Oxide and their history, that's vanishingly unlikely though.
The reasonable conclusion is that they would not have raised yet more money if it wasn't due to being offered very generous terms by investors who wouldn't threaten the long-term future of the business.
There's a reason Apple is consistently one of the top 5 most valuable companies. It isn't because their hardware does anything that can't be done on "commodity" hardware, its that they built a software stack that "just works" and part of that was tight coupling to the hardware.
edit/update: and the Samsung acquisition was in 2016. So I'd hope the CTO would have _some_ involvement in that decision.
You still have a fairly large up front cost ($600k base in 2023ish numbers, probably over $1M now?), and an ongoing support subscription.
It would be nice to know more about pricing so the Enthusiast Joe can have a better idea, but it's more a boutique vibe right now.
They've raised a lot of money and there will be pressure for an exit sooner rather than later.
I've written on this before but Oxide are sitting in very narrow market segment in terms of value and I can't see how it's viable.
Just the thing for an ambitious enthusiast to upgrade to from their Raspberry Pi rack!
There are also many other alternatives. Example: VPS providers like Vultr which have expanded to offer more traditional "cloud" features like object storage, load balancers, managed DBs, etc. Their pricing is way more competitive than AWS, especially when you consider bandwidth.
(Those were all firsthand examples; I'm not saying everyone needs cloud providers, but there are reasons beyond "really good salespeople" that people opt for offloading those logistics.)
You can be cashflow positive and still benefit from having a larger pool of cash to throw around, particularly in any situation involving hardware manufacturing.
If you tell your investors "our limiting factor is how fast we can spend to deliver on additional requirements for these new customers", then it can both be true that you're not going to miss payroll for 5 years no matter what happens tomorrow and more cash would be beneficial.
You dont even have extra organizational overhead. Every cloud first company has a head of devops sitting in the chair where head of infra would be. They somehow wind up with like half the staffing anyways compared to running bare metal.